I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like that?
But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.
Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.
We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.
We used to believe that memories are best retrieved in the same place where they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that’s not so clear anymore. But
Threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not.
There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian lands...
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
The white culture rewarded cruelty with honor and friendship.
The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it...
Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.
No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.
My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.
My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.
My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is...
I’m red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes.
It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.
IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.
I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them. Freak or fake, I’d been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both.
Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.